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Prologue

When I first landed on American soil in 1991, I had little money and even less direction. Precisely 21 years later, in 2012, I sat next to President Barack Obama at a roundtable discussion with fellow CEOs, sharing my policy recommendations about American entrepreneurship and manufacturing.

During the intervening years, I created a company in America and built a factory there to manufacture its products, realizing my version of the American Dream. In this book, I describe how I did it. As I hope to convince you, the American Dream remains vital and accessible to all of us, so long as we're willing to burn—igniting that flame within and pursuing our passion with courage and creativity, innovating and adapting to our constantly changing society.

It took me a while to activate and stoke my own internal flames. Growing up, I'd trained in China to become a diplomat. After this career path became impossible, I secured a visa to the United States with dreams of becoming a journalist. The best job I could find after graduating with my master's degree was for a medical device company, performing low‐end administrative work for $19,000 a year. I could only pivot to a new life of purpose when I followed the path of many immigrants to America. Mobilizing my experience, savvy, intuition, and professional skills, I became an entrepreneur, creating products that filled a specific market niche.

Like many immigrants, I succeeded in business by using my cross‐cultural background to reimagine stale consumer categories and places, infusing them with new meaning and value. It took an immigrant like me to see Chesapeake Bay as a beacon of nature and peace rather than as ugly and polluted, as many of my friends and neighbors regarded it. This piece of real estate exercised such a hold on me that it became enmeshed in my personal and professional identities. It's the place I've called home since moving to the United States, and it's the region on which I took a huge financial gamble in opening a factory. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business leader, or simply interested in America's ongoing business strength, I hope you'll come away from this book appreciating the contributions of immigrants, and be inspired to look at landscapes, product categories, and social problems with new eyes.

I also hope you'll think a bit differently about innovation, that cornerstone of American prosperity. The word “innovation” usually conjures up groundbreaking technical breakthroughs. To create a diverse and robust economy, however, entrepreneurs must take a broader view of innovation, training their talents on “mundane” industries and product categories like exercise equipment, investment tools, Chino clothes, candles, and underwear. Read the following pages to discover how I stumbled into the candle industry, using my creativity to transform these once‐boring products into fashion items that enhance and elevate a person's home and life. This book is my rousing call for more entrepreneurs to similarly push the boundaries of innovation, creating a set of products and services that solve consumer and environmental problems, making life more efficient and enjoyable in the process.

In many ways, my success with candles is unsurprising in today's market where creative leaders increasingly supplant business‐savvy MBAs and technocrats in achieving market success and social impact.¹ I use the term “design leadership” to refer to today's creativity‐driven economy. Design leaders are creative businesspeople who prioritize their service or product's core “design” or message above profitability, price, shareholder‐value maximization, and the like. Instead of leveraging design to chase margins and profitability, design leaders use it to drive sales, marketing, manufacturing, and other business activities. We're long familiar with the world's legendary design leaders. Instead of competing on price, Steve Jobs harnessed the power of design‐driven innovation when creating and manufacturing his world‐changing Macintosh computer and iPhone line. Elon Musk accomplished the same, parting from fossil fuel–inspired profit models and design templates to fashion an automobile as intuitive to operate as an iPhone and heralding a new era in which clean energy replaces the environmentally damaging combustion engine.

Though I built Chesapeake Bay atop these same foundations of design leadership, letting innovation and creativity dictate business decisions, it was only by controlling manufacturing that I could maximize creativity and fuel my products' popularity among consumers. When factories in Asia refused to work with my design‐driven collections, my passion and vision convinced my sister to quit her job and build a factory to help grow my business. Together, we created new consumer‐product lines in the home fragrance and wellness industries and brought these luxuries, once reserved for wealthy department‐store consumers, to a mainstream American market. But I could only achieve peak innovation when I stopped outsourcing manufacturing, breaking with my US counterparts in reshoring many of my operations to America.

By bringing industrial processes in‐house, I increased the quality of my source ingredients, marrying manufacturing and innovation to reach my highest creative potential. In America, my company accomplished the seemingly impossible: building a factory outside Baltimore, where manufacturing was long considered dead. I hope other product categories follow my lead, leveraging design leadership and creative manufacturing to better observe and respond to markets, decrease costs, increase innovation, and improve quality.

As I told President Barack Obama during our meeting at the White House, I was confident that design‐driven entrepreneurship and thoughtful manufacturing would power growth and prosperity throughout the global economy. But much has changed since then. During my entrepreneurial career, people and ideas traversed the globe, governments more freely cooperated in international accords, and technological innovation powered exciting new breakthroughs. Today, the world has become more pessimistic, protectionist, and insular. Instead of understanding technology and globalism as contributors to our collective prosperity, people have experienced their corrosive effects on democracy, economic abundance, and human happiness. But I still believe the words I told the president. As I hope to persuade you in the following pages, design leadership remains vital to a robust, global economy.

As a Chinese immigrant to America, I constantly encounter the dreaded America‐versus‐China question. Will America remain the global superpower, or will China take its place? I object to the question because I hope America and China both remain strong, resolving their differences and becoming good economic partners again. But the larger question of America's fate is deeply personal to me. America, I believe, will always be preeminent to the extent that my story remains possible. As long as a foreign national can arrive on its shores as an alien and then appear at the White House 20 years later, rest assured that America will remain the world's beacon of opportunity and prosperity.

—Mei Xu

Endnote

1 1 For this overview, I am indebted to Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005), 1–4. Pink's powerful and penetrating book helped inspire my ideas of design leadership.